Page:Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 2.djvu/157

 frightened to see the effect it made, and to see the horses manœuvring; then I had them taken to see the destruction and desolation of the city of Temixtitan, and they were astonished on beholding it and its strength and its fortress, situated as it was in the water. After four or five days, I gave them for their chief many such things as they esteemed, and others for themselves, so they departed very happy and satisfied.

I have heretofore made relation to Your Majesty about the river of Panuco, which is fifty or sixty leagues down the coast from the city of Vera Cruz, where the ships of Francisco de Garay had gone two or three times and received a good deal of hurt from the natives of the said river on account of the little tact which the captains who had been sent there had shown in the traffic they attempted to establish with the Indians. Afterwards, when I perceived that on the whole coast of the South Sea there was a lack of harbours, and that none was equal to the harbour of that river, and also because those natives, after coming to me to offer themselves as vassals of Your Majesty, are making war against the vassals of Your Majesty, our friends, I felt it very necessary to send a captain there with a force to pacify all that province, and, if the country was a likely one for settlement, to establish a town on that river, so that the entire neighbourhood might be assured. Although we were few and scattered in three or four places, from which reason there was some opposition to taking more people from here, nevertheless, both in order to help our friends, and because, after the taking of the city of Temixtitan, ships had arrived bringing some people and horses, I prepared twenty-five horsemen and one hundred and fifty foot soldiers to go with their captain to the said river.

While engaged in dispatching this captain, they wrote to me from Vera Cruz that a ship had arrived in its port,